The Sinking of the Farina, 1913

Thursday

Mar 31, 2011 at 12:01 AMApr 7, 2011 at 3:57 PM

On August 9, 1913, an overloaded power boat, Farina, sank in Long Pond with the loss of seven lives. Historically, the sinking is the worst single tragedy to have ever occurred on the ponds at Lakeville.

On August 9, 1913, an overloaded power boat, Farina, sank in Long Pond with the loss of seven lives. Historically, the sinking is the worst single tragedy to have ever occurred on the ponds at Lakeville.

The party had embarked aboard Farina, a powerboat owned by Alfred Joan of Brockton, for a cruise to Lakeside Park at the southern end of the pond in Freetown where they proposed attending a dance. Those members residing in New Bedford planned on returning to the city by trolley while the remainder was to return to Lewis Island in Lakeville where they were guests at a number of cottages there. "All of the party were young and bent on a good time. Their singing could be heard as they left shore, but before they had gone far their song was shifted into shrieks for help which startled campers along the shore," recorded one local newspaper at the time.

The members of the boat party had been invited by Luther M. Dayton of New Bedford who owned a cottage on Lewis Island. Among the members setting out that evening in addition to Dayton were the occupants of the neighboring cottage, R. James Stevens and his fiancée Miss Attie Hamilton of Taunton; four female employees of the Sharp Mill of New Bedford and their chaperone Mrs. Raymond; and George E. Wright of Brockton and his fiancée Miss Edith Haven who were also staying on the island. Dayton later explained to the press how the members of this party, all relative strangers to one another, had come together.

"I seated the party and I was the one to ask the last four people to join our original party of five, myself and the four New Bedford girls. We were going over to Lakeside where the girls were going to have a dance and return to New Bedford. I didn't think my boat would be safe as it is only a little sixteen footer, and very narrow, but I had the use of Joan's boat and went over after it. Mr. Wright and Miss Havens were at the [Joan] house and I didn't think it was quite right to take their boat without asking them to go along. At first they said they didn't care to but I urged and unfortunately they came. Stevens and Miss Hamilton were in the next house and I asked them to come along too and they did. People have spoken about it's being queer that we hadn't met in the party before, and that is the way it happened."

Of the ten aboard the boat that night, it was later reported that Mrs. Henry W. Raymond, 40, was the sole member who could swim.

The boat Dayton borrowed was Farina, an eighteen-foot power boat (other reports state fourteen) owned by Albert Joan of Brockton, a fellow cottager on Lewis Island. At the time of the tragedy, it was described as follows: "The cockpit is about 10 feet long, and three feet wide, and on either side is a row of seats. In the middle was the engine, taking up more than two feet of running space." As the Lewis Island cottage owners formed a closely knit community, Dayton and Joan were well acquainted, and Dayton had previously been lent the use of Farina for outings and was well familiar with the craft.

The boat had started out well enough with Dayton as engineer seated in the stern near the engine, and Stevens at the wheel. It was later reported that either on the approach to Goat (Ram) Island, or just after the island had been passed off the port side and the Farina had entered open water, "the boat suddenly sprang a leak"¦. The first intimation they had that the boat was not in seaworthy condition was when the water rose over the flooring, wetting their feet. A hasty examination showed that the boat was taking in water." A couple of survivors would later state their belief that the "bottom had dropped out" of the boat, so rapid was the intake of water. "Before those aboard could do anything the water had risen in the bottom of the boat to such a degree that it stalled the engine. Mr. Dayton made several attempts to get the engine working again, at the same time shouting to Mr. Stevens, who was in the bow, to head the boat toward the nearest shore, that of Goat Island."

As the stern began to go under water, the party was thrown into a state bordering on panic. Dayton himself later stated that as the boat began to sink, the women screamed. "I will never forget the screams of the girls as it went down." Mrs. Raymond's statement later corroborated this, noting that "everybody screamed and made frantic grasps for anything."

Initial reports of the accident stated that "members of the party, terrified and frantic, grabbed oars and endeavored to paddle the boat toward the island" while Stevens steered a course towards where he believe Goat Island lay in the darkness. Dayton, however, gave a different picture. Following the initial panic, the party was ordered into the bow and told to remain calm. Amazingly, they did, but "before they could make any appreciable progress" and still nearly two hundred yards from the nearest shore, the boat suddenly sank. Dayton would later estimate that a mere ten minutes had elapsed between the initial sight of water in the boat and the final sinking.

There is some conflict regarding which end of the boat sank first. The first newspaper reports indicate that water was believed to have entered at the bow, though subsequent accounts are probably more correct, indicating that the boat sank stern first and that the bow was kept partly afloat by a nearly empty gasoline tank at that end.

With the boat slipping below the surface of the pond, Dayton and Stevens did their best to save the other members of the party. Dayton recalled, "Then came the horrible struggle to keep the girls on the boat. Stevens and I tried our best to hold them forward, standing on the gunwales, and we kept encouraging them as much as we could but one by one they would slip away silently into the blackness, and we wouldn't see or hear anything more from them. My God it was horrible."

To be continued

For more local history, visit www.nemasket.blogspot.com

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